One of the major unanswered questions about Bill C-30, the lawful access/online surveillance bill, is who will pay for the costs associated with responding to law enforcement demands for subscriber information (“look ups”) and installation of surveillance equipment (“hook ups”). Christopher Parsons has an excellent post that takes a shot at estimating some of the costs. I recently obtained documents from Public Safety under the Access to Information Act that indicates that the government doesn’t really have its own answer. As of December 2011, the issue was still the subject of internal debate with Public Safety working with the RCMP and CSIS to develop a fee schedule for the costs.

The document is particularly interesting because it places the spotlight on how the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police (CACP) would like to handle the issue. In 2009, the CACP proposed several possibilities, including the creation of new public safety tax that would appear on monthly customer bills.

The “Vigilante” Provision

Another dangerous provision in PIPA and SOPA that hasn’t received a lot of attention is the “vigilante” provision, which would grant broad immunity to all service providers if they overblock innocent users or block sites voluntarily with no judicial oversight at all. The standard for immunity is incredibly low and the potential for abuse is off the charts. Intermediaries only need to act “in good faith” and base their decision “on credible evidence” to receive immunity.

Caesar, a political propagandist, not a trained ethnographer, uses three terms to refer to tribal groupings, namely “ Celts ”, also called “ Gauls ” in Latin, “ Germans ”, and “ Belgae ”, and any discussion of ethnicity involves us in trying to understand these terms. Caesar in the very first chapter of his work defines the German specifically as those “ who dwell across the Rhine ”, that is, east of the river, and seems to be trying to suggest as a result that the Rhine is a natural boundary. He also emphasizes the difference between the Celts and Germans, and insists upon the terror which the Germans inspire, “ by the huge size of their bodies, by their incredible courage and skill in arms ”. He argues, as it suits his political purpose, that if the Germans who had already invaded Gaul before he himself got there had not been checked and driven back across the Rhine where he claims they belonged, they might have overrun all Gaul and threatened Italy, “ as previously the Cimbri and Teutoni had done ”. The Cimbri and Teutoni had been turned back by Marius less than half a century before, so that there were Romans who could still remember the terror that they had inspired. It was a potential parallel.

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Now if the cultural differences between Celts and Germans were as great as Caesar suggests, and if the Rhine indeed formed the ethnic frontier, we are entitled to expect corresponding differences in material culture to show up in the archaeological record, thus making the Rhine the archaeological frontier also. The fact is that they do not […]

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The Belgae are either the key to the situation, or a confusing anomaly. […]